Abjuration
by sodakey
Summary: They all wanted it to be a good shoot. A tag to the season two episode "The Boogeyman." Potential spoilers for all preceding episodes. Reid. Morgan. Elle heavily referenced. Team referenced. Gen.


_Summary: _They all wanted it to be a good shoot. Morgan. Reid. Team referenced. Elle heavily referenced. Gen.

Tag for the season two episode _Boogeyman_ in which Elle resigned her position. Set after the plane lands and the rest of the team has come back from their case.

_Disclaimer: _not mine

_Author notes and warnings: _assumes you are familiar with the show and its characters. Spoiler warnings for the episodes _Boogeyman_, _Aftermath_, and _The Fisher King_ (parts one and two). This is what I consider an unnecessary tag because I like the tone the episode itself left off with, emotionally, verbally, all of the above. No new ground being broken here. No Shakespeare. Just superfluous speculation. Cool?

And yes, this is another piece dragged from the ancient depths of my fanfiction files, but reworked for coherency. ;) More angst than action. I should just group these one-shots into a series. I could call it the _Morgan and Reid Have a Conversation_ series for how exciting they are. Apparently, I like it when they say stuff, and I'm always putting Morgan in the sage role, which I think he actually excels at with Reid, particularly in the early years, but one of these days, I'll have to reverse it.

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**Abjuration**

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**

Despite the oldness of the car, the engine had a smooth sound, a resonant sound, and when Reid turned it off, the reality left by the silence was abrasive and empty. The intermittent rush of vehicles flashing by on the road out front felt too far away to be real. Dimensionally separate. Apart.

The car door creaked when he opened it, two octaves lower than the groan of the gate leading into the garden walk at the back of Elle's apartment, but both sounds felt like warning signs. And like absence.

He ignored them.

After re-closing the gate, the echoes of the city, real or imagined, seemed to cease. Bushes lined the fence, bunching close along the base. Trees stood sentry near the perimeter, upper branches laced together to veil the sky.

Elle had selected the ground floor unit before she'd even joined the BAU. During his first visit, she'd told Reid that the rear exit into the trees always reminded her that she wasn't in Brooklyn anymore. She didn't hate Brooklyn, she'd clarified, she'd just needed something different to remind her of the path she'd chosen. And to remind her of all the others she could've, but didn't.

Reid hadn't understood. Not completely. Not then.

But her words—the expression on her face as she'd said them—kept coming into his head, stuck in his ears like molasses ever since he'd tried to talk to her in her hotel room. They were there now, standing in the yard with him, feeling the same fear, hearing the same palinode. Ignoring the same reality.

Elle's windows were grey—no light in them except the smattering of fading sun across the west-side panes. He knocked too hard on the door and felt the reverberating sting in his knuckles for a full minute after. The doorknob, when he tried it, was cold under his palm. He rattled it and leaned up on the step, peering through the sun's glare to the space inside.

It was empty.

Abandoned.

She was already gone.

"No one home?" asked Morgan.

Startled, Reid spun.

Standing with his hands in his pockets at the end of the walkway, Morgan was motionless. "Reid, I told you not to do this to yourself," he said. His voice was tired, but there was no malice in it. The reverberation under the words sounded like Reid felt, like his skin was inside out and the electric impulses of the world were touching things inside him in ways they shouldn't.

For a moment, they just stared at each other.

Slowly, Reid bent his knees, folding down until he was seated on the stairs.

Morgan stepped closer. "I know you wanted it to be a good shoot."

Reid swallowed, moving his eyes down towards the cracks breaking across the pavement.

Morgan stood silent, then pulled his hands from his pockets. "Talk to me," he said, tapping the side of Reid's head as he sat next to him. "What's going on up there?"

Reid wedged his lips together, pulling at his mind until he got his mouth open. "One of the classes my mother taught was in comparative literature," he started. "She used to give her students the assignment of finding current metaphorical applications of classical themes. Good and evil. Family. Religion. Her favorites were from the Arthurian legends."

Morgan waited.

"She used to say that any group tied together by a shared ideation or common purpose qualified as a religion, and that any group with a common subset of unique cultural understandings qualified as a family, and that by those definitions, the Arthurian themes were everywhere."

"What are you getting at here?" Morgan asked softly.

"Randall Garner called me Percival," Reid answered, turning his head to watch Morgan's face. "In most recountings of the grail quest, Percival has the power to heal The Fisher King's wounds if he just asks the right question."

"And?"

"And I'm thinking… Randall Garner blew himself up, and Elle…"

"So… what? You think you should've been able to ask the right question and match up to the legend?"

"Actually, I'm saying that I did," Reid said, folding his arms across his torso. "In most versions of the story, Percival both succeeds and fails. He achieves the grail but fails to heal the king. He doesn't ask the right question, or in some versions, doesn't even know he's supposed to ask one. In the end, Percival returns to the other knights to continue their journey, and The Fisher King is condemned to live in pain the rest of his life."

Elbows on knees, Morgan laced his hands together and looked up at the trees, breathing out slow.

"I knew she was struggling. I saw it. I talked to her, but… I didn't say the right things."

"Then we're all Percival," said Morgan, bringing his eyes back around. They were darker and more angry than Reid expected them to be and he drew back slightly from the fierceness. "I told you before, Reid, this one is not on you. You did everything you could. You tried. You cared. But Elle wanted something from us that we couldn't give. Not you. Not any of us."

"What's that?"

"Perfection."

Reid rubbed at his eyes, agitation in his fingers.

Morgan cleared his throat. "There's not one of us that doesn't wish we could have protected her better, but we second guess ourselves enough. Hotch thought she was covered, and Gideon…" Morgan shook his head. "We all did the best we knew how at the time. But Elle… she stopped blaming the monsters for being monsters and started blaming the knights for not being good enough. Under those standards, none of us ever would be. We're always going to make mistakes but we can either use those mistakes as a reason to give up and lose faith, or we can use them to keep trying to do better. Elle used to believe that too."

The words were absolution. Reid felt them, like stones settling in his pockets. It felt like failure. It felt like surrender. "I feel like we've disowned her," he said. In his peripheral, he watched the slow movement of Morgan's throat.

"Reid, she took herself somewhere we can't follow—metaphorically and physically," Morgan answered, gesturing around him at the darkening trees, the empty apartment, the yard and the molasses-sticky reminder of the path she'd once chosen, abandoned now like all the rest of it. "And she doesn't want us to."

Feeling cold, Reid tucked his arms tighter into himself and leaned back against the building.

Percival, he thought, would have gone back to heal the king if he could've, once he knew the right question, but it hadn't worked that way. For either of them.

Morgan bumped his knee. "When you were talking to Randall Garner, you told him the only real question was whether or not he could forgive himself. Elle answered her own question, her own way."

"She couldn't forgive us," Reid said, voice barely audible, and watched Morgan's eyes close in response. He felt bad. And he couldn't account for the emotion in his chest with any other word. All the worry, all the hope, and they lost her anyway.

What did that mean?

Reid quantified. Sometimes he measured. He stated and quoted and explained. But this just didn't fit. They were more. Now they were less. And it didn't feel external. The seventh part of empty space was cutting its absence from the inside. She was one of them and now she wasn't. There was no explanation that didn't make it feel like defeat.

"She was struggling. We should have been able to help her."

"I know," said Morgan.

"I wish we could have."

"Me too."

Blinking into the increasing dark, Reid shifted his shoes on the cement. "I don't even know what I was going to say to her tonight," he admitted. "I just wanted to…" Working his lips, he turned again to Morgan. "What were you going to say?"

Morgan leaned forward. "I didn't come here to talk to Elle, kid, I came here to talk to you."

Reid closed his mouth, a jumble of concepts suddenly clogging up his head. Faith and loyalty and loss. It felt too esoteric to ask, and he knew there wasn't really an answer, but he asked anyway, "What do we do now?"

Morgan clapped a hand gently on his back and spoke. "We keep doing the best we can for each other, that's what we do," he said. "And we go out for dinner." He stood, pulling Reid to his feet. "Come on. JJ and Garcia are waiting out front."

"They're here?"

"Yeah."

"Hotch and Gideon?"

"Had other places to be. Tonight is just for the kids. We're going to spend some time together and say goodbye to a friend." Morgan tugged on Reid's sleeve, gripping just below his shoulder, before letting go and moving for the gate.

Hesitating only a moment, Reid followed. When they got to the end of the walk, he looked back at the empty windows one last time, seeing, for a second, beyond them to an echo of images. Randall Garner pulling the trigger. Paramedics kneeling on the floor. Hotch, standing alone, scrubbing the blood from her wall.

"Let's go, Reid," said Morgan, tightening a hand on his shoulder.

Reid nodded, turning, and they left, the ghost of memory staying behind them, abandoned to the shadows.

-

"We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else."

~ _Sigmund Freud_

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End


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